Client problem or community dead?

I re-downloaded FAF a fortnight ago and almost every time I open it there are 0 games active. When I played regularly a few months ago there were 10+ games consistently at almost any time.

Is this likely to be some issue with my client, and if so, anybody got any advice on how I can address it? Or do people just not play this as much as they used to?

Thanks

Edit: I'm running version 1.2.3

When I open the client, it often shows zero games active, but after a few seconds the games come up. I can't think of a single time that I have opened the client, waited 2 minutes, and I have seen zero active games. It might have happened once or twice, but I can't think of it. Maybe you just have to wait like 5 minutes for it to load.

When you open the client, are you able to see Aeolus chat? Does it show that people are present in chat? Even if somehow there weren't any games open, at some particulate moment, Aeolus would still be full of people. I'm curious if you can see chat messages happening in Aeolus.

You can also open the FAF discord and look at Aeolus there. If you are logged in to the FAF client and see no aeolus messages, but you can see messages on the FAF discord, that would suggest something is wrong.

You could also try chatting with Aeolus to see if people respond to you. If you are commenting into Aeolus and no one is responding to you, that would be very weird.

@Rotdog it is likely a bug affecting the custom games list, preventing it from displaying any games. I have experienced it myself although rarely. Try restarting the client.

If it happens consistently for you, check the client log files for any unusual errors and consider filing a bug report on GitHub

Also, just looking at the "live replays" tab of FAF, I can see that every minute, there is almost always at least 1 game launching. That appears to be true for the past 2 hours at least. So if you looked in the past 2 hours and saw no games, then something is clearly wrong.

It sounds like he has been restarting his client, so that isn't going to fix it for him.

It might make sense just to uninstall the FAF client, re-download it, and reinstall it completely. He wouldn't have to uninstall/reinstall SC:FA itself. Just the client.

Also, I'm curious if he can join games via chat. If you look at the list of participants in Aeolus and you see someone with a yellow sword next to their name, it means they are in a lobby. You can double-click on their name and try to join the lobby that way. If he is able to join lobbies that way, it would be pretty clear that his problem is only with the custom games list.

Also, @Rotdog if you want technical help, the best place is Discord I think. For one thing, people can message you if they're ready to try to help you.

Another thing you could try: make your own custom lobby and see if people join. I would be curious if other people can see YOUR lobbies. Just put on Winter Duel and call it "all welcome." If anyone else can see it, someone will probably join within 5 minutes.

There’s always been between 12 and 60 games hosted in lobby at any time this month. There’s also been between 100-400 games being played at any point in time.

Thanks for the replies, it seems like it was just some weird temporary issue that was hanging around for a few days and then fixed itself. All back to normal now. Glad FAF is alive and thriving!